When it comes to the environment, every little bit helps. If you’re looking to adopt more sustainable practices, we’ve found four apps that could be a good place to start.

Olio: Share unwanted food and eliminate waste

Olio connects you to other users so that you can share unwanted food and household items or products that may be about to expire.

Before you sign up, check to make sure your suburb is listed. If it is, add a photo, description, and when and where the item is available for pick-up. To see what’s on offer, browse the listings available near you, ask for what takes your fancy and arrange a pick-up via private messaging.

Through Olio, nearly a million portions of food have been shared across the world – that’s the equivalent of about 45 million car kilometres saved.

Download it on the App Store or Google Play.

GoodFish: sustainable seafood and restaurant guide

GoodFish is an initiative run by the Australian Marine Conservation Society. Their app can help you make ethical choices about the fish you eat. It works with a traffic-light system. Just search the type of seafood you want to buy and it’ll come up as either red (say no), orange (eat less) or green (better choice).

It even breaks down the categories by states. For example, wild-caught abalone is labelled green in Western Australia but orange in Tasmania.

You can also search for restaurants and cafes that source sustainable seafood.

Download it on the App Store or Google Play.

Forest: a productivity app that plants real trees

Forest is a gamified app where you set blocks of focus time to increase your productivity and limit mindless phone scrolling.

As the timer counts down, a virtual tree grows. If you leave the Forest screen before the set time’s up, the tree dies. But if you do maintain your focus time, you’ll build up a virtual forest, earning virtual coins that go towards planting real trees.

Forest has partnered with tree-planting organisation, Trees for the Future. Forest app users have helped to plant over a million trees across five countries in Sub Saharan Africa.

Download it on the App Store or Google Play.

ShareWaste: find your neighbourhood compost

According to ShareWaste, composting 12kg of food waste will stop about 1kg of methane being released into our atmosphere. That’s equivalent to driving about 100km in a car or charging your smartphone 3000 times.

If you don’t have the space or finances to compost, ShareWaste will connect you to people in your neighbourhood who have compost bins. Or if you’re a composter with room for more scraps, you can alert others to your bin.

All you need to do is type in your address, then an embedded Google map will show you composters in your area. The app also records your ‘impact’ and gives you an overview of how much new soil or animal feed you’ve created with your kitchen scraps.

Download it on the App Store or Google Play.